Is Starmade ready for Steam?

[Dire Badger]

Based on what I have seen (coming back after a year), I think that Starmade is 'almost' ready for Steam early release, or a fully paid/early release payment model.

The crafting system is fully encapsulated and relatively balanced, Planets are really well done, the new rail system is outstanding and very intuitive, the default structures are staggeringly gorgeous and set the bar for ship creativity extremely high, the mapping system is finally intuitive, and in general it seems to be very well balanced.

A few minor things should probably be changed first:
mass multiplication on chained rail systems
objects in advanced construction mode should be fullbright in their preview screen.
'old' docking needs to be removed

Everything else could be bugfixed/optimized after early release. BTW, this is really a glowing recommendation, as a Lot of things on early release still belong in the 'prealpha' stage, and I think Starmade is just about ready to move from Alpha to early beta and a fully paid model.

That way the modders could start really getting their hands into the guts of it. And maybe help schine with some optimizations (That's what happened with Minecraft... many later improvements were adaptations of mod code)

Thoughts?

 

[Puck]

nooo it's not ready you can bet on that, planets are a disaster

 

[therimmer96]

Its already on steam...

 

[Dire Badger]

yeah, I meant as a fully paid early release.
[DOUBLEPOST=1432638133,1432638097][/DOUBLEPOST]

nooo it's not ready you can bet on that, planets are a disaster

How do you figure?

 

[SkylordLuke]

its not ready,lol soo many features are still needed before we even think about fully paid release

 

[Ithirahad]

Based on what I have seen (coming back after a year), I think that Starmade is 'almost' ready for Steam early release, or a fully paid/early release payment model.

No... The Steam Early Access release was already stupidly early. The last thing we need is a full release; it would be a huge waste. Remember, as cool as the game's individual features may currently be, there are still no quests, no reason for faction war... Really, no reason to actually play the game unless you're a builder.

The crafting system is fully encapsulated and relatively balanced,

Yes, but mining sucks... And there are other things that should play into crafting that don't at the moment. Farming, planet resource extraction... And generally, more valuables to fight over.

Planets are really well done,

Uh. Wuh... Wut? Did you seriously just say that? Current planets, which are basically clusters of ridiculously large natural stations, are laggy and a really bad way to handle planets. Granted, when they are set to a large size, work properly, and someone has a godly computer (32 GB ram, four NVIDIA Titans in SLI, overclocked high-end Intel i7, water cooling... :p) it looks really cool, but fact is, in reality most people don't have that kind of computer. As a result, playable-sized planets end up really small. I'm sorry, but if your game has an art style like this one, then 100-meter awkward polyhedron planets are nearly as bad as the flat cookies we had before.

the new rail system is outstanding and very intuitive,

Outstanding? Yes. Intuitive? Not really... At least, the reorientation system is certainly not intuitive. It works, but it's weird as heck.

the default structures are staggeringly gorgeous and set the bar for ship creativity extremely high, the mapping system is finally intuitive,

Yeah!

and in general it seems to be very well balanced.

Eh... We still need a rewrite and a rebalance on the missile explosions, and certain features need to be implemented to achieve a proper balance. There's also the whole big ship/smaller ship issue... Which the armour bonus system (while I support it) will just make worse. Some serious rebalances (and the removal of all the linear scaling) are needed here, or many people will get frustrated and leave.

A few minor things should probably be changed first:
mass multiplication on chained rail systems
objects in advanced construction mode should be fullbright in their preview screen.
'old' docking needs to be removed

I find the list to be quite a bit longer than this... What about all the unfinished features? Even if we were to rush to a release, we should at least get the crew system to do something and stop being so buggy, and add fleet AI. We should allow multi-stacks to be sold in a shop without being split up. We should... well, you get the point.

BTW, this is really a glowing recommendation, as a Lot of things on early release still belong in the 'prealpha' stage, and I think Starmade is just about ready to move from Alpha to early beta and a fully paid model.

Maybe so, but I think that this doesn't show that SM is ready to move to early release and beta, it just shows that a lot of other games move to beta and an early release way too fast. :p

That way the modders could start really getting their hands into the guts of it. And maybe help schine with some optimizations (That's what happened with Minecraft... many later improvements were adaptations of mod code)

There's an API planned for modding, which is - guess what - another feature Schema and co. have to add, preferably before Beta. The awkward third-person APIs of Minecraft should not, and will not, exist here.

 

[Winterhome]

I keep telling myself that Starmade won't be totally free after it hits beta. I dunno when that'll happen.

Too many bugs to be the final release, and we need some sort of real enjoyability for solo players other than building pretty ships and st00f.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Sound system still needs to be overhauled. Majority of the time I cant hear cannons and missiles need explosions and sounds.

 

[CyberTao]

I guess it might be easy to think we are ready for anything like a full release if you just came back and saw all the changes, but stick around for a while and you'll soon find we are still a ways away from even Beta.

 

[Keptick]

It'd be a much better idea to let it sit in the shadows for a while, le people forget the lack of stuff to do in-game and then do a release and advertize once those new shinies are in.

Right now there's not much player retention, mostly due to the fact that there's practically nothing to do past ship building. Of course, there's stuff to do on servers but I think that most people keep to single player, which is a shame. The steam release was already too early, imo, since some people will probably never look at the game again, even if it migh have become interesting for them.

 

[Byamarro]

There is still no sense at playing. Game throws You in mid space and tells: do what You want, only pirates and other players limits You.
No quests, survival aspects and hell... Mining is terrible.

Don't get me wrong I really love SM and I see it's potential but I feel that devs forget to add some meaning to the game. I really love rails etc. but we really need something that will SHAPE gameplay. Now it's just shapeless.

 

[Ithirahad]

Yeah... I once said, I'd rather have seen a living universe with depth but still only have wedges and blocks for ships and only missiles and AMCs for weapons, than tons of awesome building possibilities in a dead universe. (Granted, a few things should be added to ships no matter what, so they're more immersive - most of which we still don't have.) Sadly, the latter is exactly what we got...

 

[jorgekorke]

It was never ready for steam release, I say that since the day it came out.

And the result is there : a low population regardless of the release.

 

[ne3zy]

not ready as a game since it's only a sandbox

 

[BDLS]

Perhaps after the beta starts in 2019

soon™©®

 

[SmilingDemon]

for Steam ? ... because of Steams Quality Control, Starmade is more than ready ... i would argue it is in a perfect release state, compared to most of the Greenlight Unity bullshit

 

[Visitor]

Depends, OP, by what categories you'd judge it. In comparison with some of the titles one can see half-baked in Steam workshops and whatnot - yeah, StarMade isn't lacking and can be possibly brought to Steam.

However, as an actual game brought to that platform to get more players, I suspect it would do poorly. Despite ongoing work, many things before aforementioned above planets need optimization and polishing, many core systems seem more like a placeholder there are plans to change (core blocks instead of proper command bridges and pilot cockpits) and there's very little gameplay (and what there is - is very simple) to be had outside of building stuff.

Once we have some long-term goals and slightly more immersive and functional world (for me it'd be stuff like life support and general survival mechanics, proper balance of costs and gains of ships of different sizes, finalized subsystems like cockpits, end-game goals, quests and enemies, maybe even overaching and open - but still existing - fluff background) I wouldn't mind StarMade being actively promoted on Steam. As things are right now, the game holds a lot of promise and potential, some of it realized - but that's about it.

 

[Jananton]

for Steam ? ... because of Steams Quality Control, Starmade is more than ready ... i would argue it is in a perfect release state, compared to most of the Greenlight Unity bullshit

Hmm, lets start to say Unity isn't bullshit, but creating games is a lot more involved then many aspiring game creators using Unity seem to think.

When you remember that many full blown games are made by a team comparable with a reasonable sized film crew, including the enormous costs of at least a feature length movie these days, then the speed of development of StarMade on a penny and a shoestring is actually quite high. :D

Maybe the Steam release was a bit early for the amount of content in there at that time, but one shouldn't look a given horse in the mouth since it's free of charge still...

Greets,

Jan

 

[SmilingDemon]

Of course the Unity Engine is an easy and powerful set of tools and definitely not Bullshit ... didn´t want to be missunderstood there.

 

[Edymnion]

Honestly? Who cares?
I for one avoid Steam and anything like it at all costs. I unhook any games I have that try to use Steam from it first thing, and all around do my damndest to not even let it launch under any circumstance.